Tower and Town, July 2024

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Clergy Letter

The world is full of gardeners and, just as with flowers and fruit, gardeners come in all shapes and sizes. We have professionals who dedicate their lives to producing the best of blooms, new and old, and we have those with nothing but window boxes and indoor plants who still manage to create havens of beauty and interest.

Jesus uses pastoral images of growth: the flowers of the field, ears of corn and seed that is sown, but He likens the Kingdom of Heaven to a vineyard on more than one occasion and stresses our responsibility for helping the vines to flourish. The image He uses applies equally to vine cultivation today as it did in His time on earth. You cannot leave a vine to its own devices. It will just sprawl all over the place and produce leaves rather than fruit. To counteract this tendency the vine grower severely prunes each vine during the winter months. Jesus says we are pruned by His words. It is through listening to Him that we stay on the right course and produce fruit.

We sometimes think of our lives and purely enclosed by our individual occupations and relationships, as if our responsibilities end at our garden gate or front door. The state of our present world urges us to extend that viewpoint so that we ask more wide-reaching questions. Is there anything I can do in my life that will make this world a better place to live in? The image of the vine expressed by Jesus may help us to find a way of responding to this challenge. As Jesus sees it, we can only bear fruit if we are in union with Him. The fruit we bear is not restricted to being kind to family and friends but to seeing how our stewardship of the world may be best achieved bringing care, healing, growth and life. "It is to the glory of my Father that you should bear fruit, and then you will be My disciples." (John 15:8).

The fruit we are trying to bear is literally a fruit that will last and is grown, not through exploitation, but through cooperation and shared goodwill.

Fr John Blacker

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